Recent Reviews
interpreter of maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
Jhumpa Lahiri received the Pulitzer Prize in 1999 for her collection of stories titled interpreter of maladies. These beautifully written narratives focus on the joys and sorrows of immigrants from the Bengalese region of India as they navigate their new lives in Boston. They feel grateful for the opportunities they have been given to live and work in America. While adapting to American culture, they still cling to their customs from home. They long for the familiar food, smells and sounds of India. Lahiri captures the intimate feelings of both the mundane aspects of their new lives as well as the significant milestones of living in the diaspora.
All the stories are strong. Perspectives vary as we hear from people of different genders, class and abilities. The Blessed House is about a married Hindu Indian couple who move into a suburban Connecticut house and discover that the prior owners left various Catholic trinkets. The husband wants to discard the items and the wife wants to display them. The husband realizes that he agreed to an arranged marriage because he thought his life lacked love. However, as he and his new wife discuss the Catholic knickknacks, he realizes he does not understand who he married and what love entails.
The stories crescendo to my favorite and final story of the book, The Third and Final Continent. After studying in London, a nameless young man returns to India. With his consent, his brother and his wife have arranged for him to marry before he moves to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to work at an MIT library. His wife, Mala, whom he barely knows, will soon join him. He rents a room from Mrs. Croft, a 100-year-old woman. His tender, patient response to her diminishment gives us many clues to his empathic character. This man’s gentleness and compassion grace the story. Thirty years later, he reflects on his physical and emotional journey from his Bengalese roots to his life in suburban Boston. He says with awe, “Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary, as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.”
Lahiri’s gorgeous collection of stories allows readers to understand the experience of another culture and its people. With an abundance of historical, social and political context, she transports us into the hearts and minds of Indians living in America in the 1970s. Due to her writing skills and deep humanity, she interprets the maladies of those we meet with insight and compassion.
The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri
This engaging and sweeping novel by Jhumpa Lahiri spans decades and oceans as the story moves from India to Rhode Island and back to India again. On one level, the novel explores how the political turmoil of India in the 1960's changed the life of a 22-year-old man and the lives of those he loved. Yet the larger story illustrates the ways family obligations can shape our lives with or without our consent.
Subhash and Udayan Mishra are brothers born a year apart in Calcutta. Inseparable in their youth, they take different paths in their late teens. Subhash studies chemistry and is accepted into a Ph.D. program at the University of Rhode Island, while Udayan is swept into the Naxalite movement, a rebellion by young students to eradicate inequity and poverty. When the police murder Udayan for his revolutionary activities, his young wife, Gauri, is left living with her bereft and angry in-laws. To complicate matters, Gauri is pregnant
The novel explores the painful implications of these events in the life of each character and how after Udayan’s death his family members are left to pick up the pieces of his life. Family members blame each other for Udayan’s choices and they all experience loneliness, disconnection and confusion. Each surviving family member is left to suffer in his or her angst and seems incapable of moving on. Instead, they live on separate islands of guilt and shame. Subash, Gauri and Udayan’s mother and father shrivel to lesser versions of themselves and when the baby is born she absorbs the family’s sorrows.
Lahiri creates beautiful portraits of each character’s isolation and inner turmoil. As a reader, I wanted to tell each one of them to forgive themselves and talk with one other so that they might get on with their lives. But since each family member holds a shameful truth that derives from their relationship with Udayan, they hold their secrets close. Lahiri’s writing is lyrical. I just wish she had offered more dialogue between the characters so that I could have reached my own conclusions about their choices.
The Lowland gives insight into the power dynamics and traditions of an Indian family. The story also serves as a powerful reminder of how a series of small decisions can alter the course of a person’s life and the lives of his family. By the end of the novel, we feel empathy for all of the characters, as it seems they have little power to change how they feel or leave the tragedy they are living.
